[“Fame in a Footnote” —A Scholar's Fame Hardly Worth Having]

Sir Arthur Helps

[Unlike some of the other of Help's epigrammatic statements I've added to the Victorian Web, this one is part (in this case one half) of a longer mini-essay. — George P. Landow.

A man writes an elaborate work upon a
learned subject. In a few years' time, another
man writes an elaborate work upon the same
learned subject, and is kind enough to allude
to the former author in a foot-note. Twenty
or thirty years afterwards, this second man's
work is also absorbed in a similar manner; and
his labours, too, are chronicled in a foot-note.
Now, the first man's fame, if you come to look at
it carefully, is but small. His labours are kindly
alluded to in a foot-note of a work which is also
kindly alluded to in a foot-note of a work
published forty or fifty years hence.

Surely this fame in a foot-note is not much
worth having. [78]

Bibliography

[Helps, Sir Arthur]. Brevia: Short Essays and Aphorisms by the Author of “Friends in Council”. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1871. The reverse of the title page has the following: “Chiswick Press: — printed by Whittingham and Wilkins, Tooks Court, Chancery Lane [London].”